Avatar Placeholders for Forums
To make forums visually more pleasing, they should have avatars that use the first letter of their name and a deterministically chosen color as a background. Here's a mockup:
Tthis works better with unsaturated colors. I would suggest saturation < 50%. For the identicons we pick random red, green and blue values in the bottom 3/4 of the range, which ensures the colours are somewhat desturated and dark enough to contrast with a light background.